The PRESIDENT: Ladies and Gentlemen, my introduction to-night is to be very short indeed, that you may the sooner reach the treat in store. Our honored speaker of the evening has his own message for us. He also bears a message from the National Education Association. He is the honored son of his great and beloved father Bishop Vincent, he has been dean of the University of Chicago, he is still president of the Chautauqua Institution, he is the president of the University of Minnesota, more than all, he is himself, Dr. GEORGE EDGAR VINCENT. ADDRESS BY DR. VINCENT Dr. VINCENT said, in opening his address, that he brought the greetings of the National Education Association, being an "uninstructed delegate," and he firmly believed "that with your tact, with your boundless energy, with your irresistible enthusiasm, you will ultimately sweep away into the vortex of your aggressive enterprise even the school teachers of the United States and Canada." Continuing Dr. Vincent said: I find some difficulty in deciding just what analogy I shall use this evening. This is a subject which has exhausted almost all the forms of metaphor, simile and analogy. Librarians have been likened to almost everything under the sun. There are three metaphors which have survived from the old days. You are all familiar with these. You use them ironically, to describe that condition of affairs which prevailed in libraries before you supplanted those archaic people who used so thoroughly to misinterpret the functions of the librarian. One is the analogy of the museum, the library as a museum of books, a museum carefully guarded, a museum to which the public is not to be admitted except under conditions which make resort to the place so irksome that only a few persist. You remember the old story of the man in Philadelphia who had committed a crime. To escape detection and go where nobody would look for him, he resorted to the reading room of the Philadelphia library. Then there is the other analogy--I do not know that this has been, so far, insisted upon, but it is a very good one, it seems to me--the analogy of the penitentiary of books, with the librarian as a jailer. Just why these people should have been put in prison as they were in the old days, just why their friends should not be permitted to visit them, it is hard to say. This is akin to another analogy, the library as a mausoleum of books, a place where books are buried, and the librarian is a bibliotaph.